With more and more information being stored electronically, it is found that the information is often stored in different formats, i.e., different types of files, on different storage media, or run by different operating systems. For example, some data may be stored in Microsoft Word format, some data may be stored in WordPerfect format, some data may be stored in Microsoft Excel format, and some data may be stored in a variety of email formats including, but not limited to, Microsoft Mail, Outlook, Group Wise, Lotus Notes, etc. Also, data may be stored in a hard drive, a floppy disk, a backup tape, a CD, or an optical device, etc. Further, data may be operated by a UNIX, NOVELL, NT, or DOS system, etc.
To review and/or manipulate any of these data that are stored in different file types, different media, run by different operating systems, a customer often needs to open/close the corresponding different software programs, such as Word, WordPerfect, Excel, Email Outlook, etc. This is a very inefficient way of reviewing and manipulating the stored data. Further, one has to have these software programs and their updated versions to review and/or manipulate the stored data.
In an area of litigation support, in particular, huge amount of documents and/or exhibits may have to be produced, organized, reviewed, reproduced, etc., for example, in merger and acquisition, intellectual property, anti-trust, and class action cases. The documents and/or exhibits may come from different locations in different file types. The existing methods of handling documents and/or exhibits include hand-coding or bar-coding. The hand-coding or bar-coding methods are not truly automated methods, and these methods are not efficient particularly in handling a volumetric amount of documents and/or exhibits.
Many litigation support companies often send out huge amounts of electronic documents to a third world developing country or hire scores of temporary workers. These workers would open documents, print documents, and enter information about a document by hand into an organized file. These methods are often time consuming, labor intensive, and prone to human mistakes. The sheer volume of data that one needs to review under strict discovery deadlines becomes a challenging and time demanding task. As a reviewer gathers electronic information, the reviewer is required to be confident that s/he has thoroughly searched, found, and reviewed all of the information residing on laptops, desktops, servers, and backup tapes, and sometimes in multiple locations.
Accordingly, there is a need for an efficient, automated data management system and method for organizing and processing a large volume of various types of data files.
It is with respect to these or other considerations that the present invention has been made.